Lou Schimmel, an adjunct scholar with the Center and its former director of municipal finance, is featured in Slate regarding his new role as emergency manager for the city of Pontiac.
My colleague Jack McHugh might have wound up oversimplifying things a bit last June when he wrote to a lawmaker that the Mackinac Center’s goal is to “outlaw government collective bargaining in Michigan, which in practical terms means no more MEA.”
Nuances sometimes get lost in quick emails. There are things short of a flat prohibition on government collective bargaining that would improve things for taxpayers in Michigan, and the MEA would probably survive in every scenario we envision. But there’s no secret agenda being revealed here.
The political class in Lansing has a propensity to spend every dime they have access to as well as raiding dedicated funds. The latest effort to tap into state trust funds for the purpose of economic development is House Bill 5168. This bill would allow the Legislature to appropriate up to 5 percent of the Michigan Natural Resource Trust Fund, State Parks Endowment Fund or the Michigan Game and Fish Protection Fund for economic development subsidies that financial institutions have deemed too risky to loan money.
By many indications, the state of Michigan’s policy landscape has improved in the last year and Gov. Rick Snyder and the Legislature deserve considerable credit for changing many policies for the better.
What changes, for better or worse, will occur in 2012? We’ll find out soon when the governor presents his State of the State speech — which may occur as early as January. The governor’s speechwriters are no doubt already working on early drafts of the speech. We can’t be sure what big policy initiatives the governor might offer up, but we do hope they include more limitations than expansions of government influence in our lives.
Mackinac Center analysts discussed education and labor issues in both Detroit newspapers over the weekend.
Michael Van Beek, director of education policy, wrote in Detroit Free Press Op-Ed why Michigan needs to embrace online learning.
Paul Kersey, director of labor policy, was cited in a Detroit News editorial regarding a new state law that requires government employees to pay a fair share of their own benefit costs.
I’ve been shopping at Meijer most of my life — in Flint, Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti and now Midland. As a student at Eastern Michigan University, a group of friends and I would occasionally go to Meijer Thrifty Acres — we called it Meijer Fifty Acres — at midnight or 1 a.m. to stock up on Ramen noodles, Lucky Charms, Doritos, Mt. Dew, some socks, a taillight for the raggedy Chevette and a tropical fish for the aquarium. They indeed had everything you needed under one roof.
Analysis by two Mackinac Center experts was featured on the editorial page of The Oakland Press today.
An Op-Ed by Paul Kersey, director of labor policy, and James Hohman, assistant director of fiscal policy, questions the need for public-sector unions. Part of this Viewpoint, by Kersey, was also featured.
The National Labor Relations Board is determined to pass new election rules that will cut the time before a vote on union representation is held down to a matter of a couple of weeks. In their rush to put the new rules into effect, the board is cutting procedural corners and quite possibly violating the law.
Mark Schauer, a former Democratic congressman from Michigan and now co-chair of the BlueGreen Alliance, is urging Gov. Rick Snyder to veto House Bill 4326, making it the governor’s first veto. As reported by MIRS news service, Schauer claims that HB 4326, which prohibits state agencies from promulgating regulations more stringent than federal requirements without legislative approval, is a potential threat to the Great Lakes.
An online news service in California cited the Mackinac Center’s 2011 school privatization survey in an article titled “Teacher Unions Launch Scare Campaign Against Concept of Privatization.”
The Center’s survey shows that a majority of public school districts in Michigan contract out for at least one of the three main noninstructional services — custodial, food or transportation — and new contracts this year alone will save taxpayers nearly $8 million.
National and state media turned to David Littmann, senior economist for the Mackinac Center, for his expert analysis on the financial crisis the city of Detroit faces. CNNMoney, CNN and The Detroit News all cited Littmann regarding the possibility of Detroit facing bankruptcy.
MichiganVotes.org sends a weekly report to newspapers and TV stations around the state showing how state legislators in their service area voted on the most important or interesting bills of the past week.
The House and Senate are in the midst of a two-week break, so rather than votes this report instead contains several newly introduced bills of interest.
There is an old saw that goes “politicians will do the right thing, but only after they have exhausted every other option.”
For years the Mackinac Center analysts and scholars have tried to persuade pols to do the right thing at the state and local level. We’ve had many successes, but cities like Detroit often acted allergic to sound, free-market policy ideas. That may be changing because Detroit is running out of money and thus, running out of options.
An Op-Ed in The Washington Times Thursday cites Paul Kersey, labor policy director for the Mackinac Center, on the benefits of right-to-work laws for job growth.
The author referred to this commentary by Kersey, which makes the point that right-to-work laws create more jobs.
As reported in MIRS Capitol Capsule, several environmental groups have launched a petition drive to encourage Gov. Rick Snyder to develop a regulatory process that would be the first step toward placing wind turbines in the Great Lakes. The Sierra Club, Michigan League of Conservation Voters, Clean Water Action, Ecology Center and the West Michigan Environmental Action Council are promoting the petition. These groups have abdicated their role of protecting the Great Lakes from pollution by their support of placing wind turbines in those very waters.
On the morning of Nov. 10, the following 13 Republican state senators all voted to implement a key component of the federal “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” by authorizing creation of a Michigan agency to administer the law’s insurance subsidies: Darwin Booher, Bruce Caswell, Judy Emmons, Mike Green, Geoff Hansen, David Hildenbrand, Mark Jansen, Rick Jones, Roger Kahn, Jim Marleau, Arlan Meekhof, John Pappageorge and Randy Richardville.
According to the Detroit Free Press, the city will run out of cash in April 2012, and the largest culprit is the growing cost of employee benefits.
It reports:
"Since 2008, health insurance costs for Detroit employees and retirees have jumped 62% to $186 million a year, city records show. During the same period, the city's contribution to pensions increased from $50 million to $120 million."
For a bold step towards freedom and fairness, legislators should repeal a law that forces government employees to contribute dues or fees to a union. Because these politically powerful unions benefit financially from the coercive extractions, this won’t happen without a fight. The speciousness of some arguments employed by government union defenders demonstrates just how far they’ll go to defend these forcibly extracted dues.
WJBK-TV2 in Detroit Tuesday night covered the story of thousands of home health care workers who are being illegally forced to pay union dues, including one couple who cares for their disabled adult children. Michigan Capitol Confidential broke the story, which has received national attention, Nov. 9.
Gov. Rick Snyder was a guest this morning on “The Frank Beckmann Show” on WJR AM760, where he discussed his role in introducing Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels at “An Evening with the Mackinac Center” held Monday night at the Lansing Center. Gov. Daniels talked about his time in office and the steps he took to reinvigorate Indiana’s business climate, several ideas of which Gov. Snyder said he hopes to adopt in Michigan.
The Detroit Free Press is reporting that the United Auto workers is laying off 58 members of its staff. The Office and Professional Employees International Union, which represents UAW staff, is crying foul.
If collective bargaining really were the great deal for workers that its union propenents claim it to be, then layoffs would be rare and concessions would be mild when they came up at all. But collective bargaining is not magic fairy dust that makes hard economic decisions go away. As the Freep article itself notes, the UAW has lost nearly 75 percent of the membership it had from its peak in 1979, and it was just a couple of years ago that two out of the Big Three were in bankruptcy.
Lou Glazer of Michigan Future remains committed to his trope in Dome Magazine, arguing that Michigan needs to focus more on higher education. But making Michigan a mecca for talent will have little effect on the state economy if the evidence from the rest of the country is any indication.
Michigan's K-12 public school establishment is (once again) up in arms over "controversial" legislation to remove a minor restriction on private and home-school students who take advantage of existing “dual enrollment” programs to take a course at state colleges and universities. The Detroit Free Press reports: "Many in the K-12 community have raised concerns, primarily about the appropriateness of using public money for nonpublic students."
“If all the economists were laid end to end, they'd never reach a conclusion.”
— George Bernard Shaw
Shaw’s quip is a good summary of how most people look at economists and the economics field in general. But while professional economists often do disagree with one another, on some matters there are surprising levels of agreement. In one of the largest surveys of economists, Harvard professor Dr. N. Gregory Mankiw identified the areas economists agree on most. These are listed below with the percent of those surveyed who agree; links are to relevant Mackinac Center articles.
The federal government must rein in spending in order to help fix the economy, David Littmann, senior economist for the Mackinac Center, told a west Michigan group today, according to The Jackson Citizen Patriot.
“Spending needs to be rolled back,” Littmann said. “In 2012,w e have to separate the rhetoric from the reality.”
